National Network for Equitable Library Service

Named a Most Anticipated Book of 2023 by LitHub A new collection of vivid, personal and provocative work from the author of Or to Begin Again, a finalist for the 2009 National Book Award in poetry In Ann Lauterbach's eleventh collection, the image of a Door recurs across several poems, as she considers the perpetual dialogue between what is open and what is shut for each of us. The Door is a threshold between the inner landscape of memory, thought, imagination and dream and the outer so-called real world, which increasingly comes to us through technology's lens, displacing and distorting our sense of intimacy, presence and relation. What is near, and what is far away? She asks about the efficacy of language itself, when confronted by the urgent uncertainties of contemporary experience.